Last night the StrongLoop gang attended the Cultivate SF Meetup hosted at GoodEggs. It proved to be both satisfying for the mind and the belly! Alon Salant and Kevin Uland are putting together something pretty special with the format of the Cultivate Meetup. Equal parts food, technology and social consciousness, blended together into quite a satisfying brew. About half of the 120 folks that RSVP’d actually turned up. This is flat out awesome for a Meetup’s first get together. After a quick intro to what GoodEggs does (locally grown food, delivered to your door), some beer and Mediterranean snacks, here’s how it went down…

Managing callbacks with generators in ECMAScript6

First up was Erin Swenson-Healey from Carbon Five talked about how to get a better handle on managing callbacks. The premise of his talk was that asynchronous programming is HARD. Why?

Non-trivial to follow a path of execution

Centralizing exception handling

Async control flow is hard

So, what’s a possible solution? Erin proposed taking a look at generators in ECMAScript6. What’s that? Well, if I paraphrase it correctly, think of it as suspendable functions with multiple entry points. Erin did a few practical code walk-thoroughs to show everyone how they worked. He also mentioned that if you want to try out for yourself, they are now supported in Node v.011. You can peep Erin’s slides here.

MongoDB Fundamentals and Performance

The final speaker of the night was Adam Hull, a developer at GoodEggs talking about MongoDB fundamentals, performance and fish! Adam got the most questions of all the speakers, which is a bit of testament to how popular MongoDB is!

Lightning strikes!

The Meetup closed up with a lightning round of 5 min talks covering everything from:

Thanks again to everyone that braved the cold to make it out. StrongLoop was glad to sponsor and help make it happen. Make sure to offer up suggestions for future topics, speakers and hackathon projects on the Cultivate SF message board.